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The end door opened, and Dion Phaneuf skated out onto the ice surface.

Late.

In an instant, with 11 others waiting to start the second half of the day’s scrimmage, sticks all over the ice were tapping in mock applause, and the hoots and hollers soon followed to the point that Phaneuf, a newly minted member of Maple Leaf royalty, lifted his stick as if to acknowledge his people.

He got the joke, and soon returned fire with his usual staccato brand of quips and comments.

Funny, and pretty loosey-goosey, the way any NHL camp needs to be with the regular season still more than two weeks away and more than five dozen players still around, wondering and hoping.

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But don’t be fooled. At this Leaf camp, there is a sense of urgency in the air, certainly from the front office. This is the camp of the 29th-best team in the NHL, a club that won six of nine pre-season games last fall then collapsed once the real bullets started to fly.

Vesa Toskala allowed seven goals on 24 shots to Buffalo in his final exhibition start and didn’t pick it up much from there. Mike Komisarek seemingly wanted to earn every penny of his five-year, $22.5 million contract in the first period of the first game, while Viktor Stalberg went from looking like Rocket Richard (six goals in eight pre-season starts) to looking like a lost boy at the CNE in a matter of days.

There was little, if any, connection between training camp, which gave opportunities to all comers, and the season. Ron Wilson, now in his third Leaf camp, can’t afford to let it be that way again.

Somehow this team has got to try to pick up where it left off last season, when it finished 7-4-2 in the final 13 games, allowing about 2.5 goals per match.

That’s why a team with very few set pieces had some of those pieces on the ice in Monday’s scrimmage. Phaneuf and Francois Beauchemin were a pair on the blue team, and Komisarek and Tomas Kaberle were together on the white squad. None of that take-a-rookie-to-work business that’s often the rule at workouts early in camp.

Even more noticeably, the trio of Tyler Bozak skating between right winger Phil Kessel and Nikolai Kulemin was intact and skating for the blues. That’s the closest thing the Leafs actually have to an established forward unit — well, the only thing, really — and it was no accident that they were together.

If there’s going to be a carryover between seasons, it will likely be constructed on the foundations of those few set pieces: the defensive tandems of veterans, the Bozak line and the goaltending team of J.S. Giguere and Jonas Gustavsson.

By Sunday, you can expect the current group of 64 players will be hacked down to a more workable number of less than 30, maybe closer to 25. There’s really no time to waste. No time to hold tryouts.

You can argue that getting through the pre-season without injuries is all that really matters, but when you’re the Leafs, being a little readier and a little bit more cohesive than the other guys in the first few weeks might produce a few extra points.

So don’t expect any Stalberg-like surprise stories. In fact, even Stalberg is gone now, peddled to Chicago, and in the place of his pleasant but tentative personality you have the very confident, exuberant Kris Versteeg, the proud owner of a Stanley Cup ring won last spring with the Blackhawks.

Stalberg might blossom with the Hawks. But Versteeg is quite clearly what the Leafs need now, an injection of noticeable belief in what is possible.

“I had that feeling once,” he said, referring to being part of a Cup champion just three months ago. “I want it back again. It was a great feeling.”

At the start of last season, Beauchemin was the only member of the Leafs who had played on a Cup champion. Over the past six months, GM Brian Burke has added three more ring owners in Versteeg, Giguere and Brett Lebda.

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